Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema: Images and Their Reception (Framing Film)

Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema combines close film analysis with a small-scale qualitative investigation of audience responses to examine images of queerness in contemporary French popular cinema and their reception. Through its blending of the textual and the empirical, this book provides a unique insight into the ways in which sexuality and gender are represented on the cinema screen, as well as the spectator reactions they elicit. Since the mid-1990s, depictions of lesbians, gay men, and queer forms of sexual desire and identity have shifted to the mainstream of French cinematographic representationas evidenced by the box-office success of a series of highly commercial comic films, including Gazon maudit (Josiane Balasko, 1995), Pédale douce (Gabriel Aghion, 1996), Le Placard (Francis Véber, 2000), and Chouchou (Merzak Allouache, 2003). Alongside this commercial strand, a series of small-budget alternative comedies and other genr